From Friendships to Community: Rejecting Capitalism and Colonialism in Our Relationships with Others
Recently, I have been pondering the concept of friendships and unpacking the value and meaning I have attached to my own friendships throughout my life. It often takes us experiencing major changes, shifts, and losses for us to reflect on these kind of big life questions. When the career I had been carefully building for myself took a number of unexpected and even painful turns, it forced me to confront the ways I attached my identity and self-worth to my job, labor, and achievements. This was an uncomfortable but necessary growth journey, and I find myself exploring a similar path with the ways I've been taught and conditioned to regard and value friendships. Over the last few years, and especially the last year, I have seen so much change in my own friendships – from the number, the depth, and the expectations therein. This reality has allowed me the opportunity to, once again, take an uncomfortable look at and dissect what I have accepted as the “truth” about friendships.
Longing for Connection
There is a lot of discourse, whether in media or within social conversations, about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on friendships. I know I am not alone, when 47% of Americans report having lost friendships since the start of the pandemic. The initial phase of “lockdown” in some ways forged deeper connections to our friends through regular video calls, while also pushing some friends further to the margins. As the ways in which we move through the ongoing pandemic (yes, it’s still happening) changes and varies from our friends, both attachments and rifts continue to ebb and flow. And while the pandemic can account for specific changes in the way we feel about and notice issues within our friendships, I think what it truly did was pull back the curtain and shine a spotlight on what was there all along. (The same can be said for how the pandemic showcased how we deprioritize and marginalize elders, children, and disabled folks.) The pandemic has perhaps forced us to see what has been missing from our connections with others.
After watching the film, Past Lives, directed by Celine Song, I was struck by the way the concept of in-yeon was woven throughout the film. In the film, two South Korean children become close friends, only to be forced apart when one family emigrates to Canada. Thanks to social media and video calling, they reconnect many years later as adults. Throughout their interactions, both as children and at different points in adulthood, you can sense a shared, deep bond between them, as if they are somehow tethered by fate. This is where in-yeon comes into play, a Korean word based on the Buddhist belief of a spiritual, predestined bond between two people. While the term “soulmate” is typically only reserved for romantic relationships, I have always felt drawn toward my closest friendships with a similar feeling of a predestined, shared bond. In fact, although I am socially extroverted and adaptable, I have always greatly struggled with navigating both conversations and friendships that feel purely surface level. And, again, I don’t think I’m alone. Whether rooted in neurodiversity, disability, history of trauma, or embracing a queer identity, there could be a number of reasons a person may gravitate toward deeper, more meaningful friendships, even when that means having fewer social connections.
Grieving Lost Friendships
Past Lives also prominently displayed the unexpected and unconventional ways grief can present, especially when we’ve experienced the loss of a bond unrelated to death. When we lose a loved one to death, it carries its own unique and immense form of grief. With the loss of a romantic relationship, we can usually eventually work through the grief by understanding the incompatibility or other variables that led to the breakup. But when we lose a deep friendship, we may struggle to make sense of the loss, and there are less resources and discourse on this topic. With the age of social media “therapy talk,” there is also an expectation to “get rid of” things and people that you feel no longer “serve” you. This creates added pressure to move on from a lost friendship. Grieving a lost friendship, especially one felt to be in-yeon, can be a confusing and isolating experience. There is grief over the loss of connection, but also loss of a version or part of ourselves the container of the friendship allowed us to express. As clinical psychologist Sophie Mort points out, “When your friendships usually feel deep and connected, disconnection or distance can feel like a rejection, which often leads to resentment, anger, sadness and confusion.” I have been grappling with my own disappointment and even resentment toward not just people who I feel have not engaged in reciprocal care, but more so toward the unwritten, silent social contract of friendships. It's as if I have been assuming we all agreed to the same terms and conditions, but then find out, sometimes in pretty painful ways, that is not the case. The loss of a friendship is also the loss of a part of our community, so if the connection and support is not replaced, the grief can be big and powerful. When we begin to regard friendships as microcosms of community and collective care, we can reframe the grief and better understand the integral role community connections play in all of our lives.
Depersonalizing While Deepening Our Friendships
Most of us feel deeply personal about our friendships, especially those of us who regard our friends as “chosen family,” and in many ways, this is can be such a positive aspect of healing from childhood trauma and more fully embracing and celebrating our true selves. However, our tendency toward deeply personalizing friendships is a manifestation of the individualistic capitalist system. Similar to romantic relationships, we tend to think of our friendships as an extension of ourselves, our identities, rather than as a natural extension of community and collective care. This perspective can also contribute to feelings of betrayal – if you regard something as belonging to you rather than supplementing your community, you can take situations personally. Likewise, people can feel abandoned by those they expected they were in community with, but realize they weren’t after all.
One way to explore the individual verses the whole is to look at what we know about forests. Forests, for a long time, were regarded as being a collective of single trees, all seen as competing for water, nutrients, and sunlight. However, more recent research suggests this couldn’t be further from the truth. Within the root system of a forest exists intricate networks, in which tree roots connect with microscopic fungal filaments to share water and nutrients and to communicate distress signals to other trees. In this light, forests can instead be seen as one being, a vast network of parts inseparable from the whole, rather than as a collective of individual trees. When I reflect on the deep meaningful friendships I’ve made and the expansive physical space between us, I think of the forest’s root system that sends water and nutrients to trees most in need. Are you sending your excess and abundance out toward those who need it? Or are you operating against the interest and health of the larger forest by trying to pull more than you need?
Understanding the Transactional Nature of Our Relationships
Within a culture plagued by consumerism and late-stage capitalism, we can find ourselves overly consuming as if we are constantly up against the clock in a supermarket sweep, with the idea of a prize dangled like a carrot to keep our shopping cart wheels spinning. We want to have experiences with our friends that make us look good or interesting, is this moment instagrammable or not? I think we are all familiar with the feeling of social media anxiety and FOMO when we see the curated snapshots of the lives of those we know, and even those we don’t. If we post online enough about our travel, our outings, our milestones, and other experiences with our friends, the more we can prove to others that we’ve “made it.” If we aren’t careful, we may find ourselves extracting these self-absorbed values from our interactions and relationships, instead of being in true community with others.
If we aren’t careful, the transactional and exploitative values of capitalism, colonialism, and American individualism and exceptionalism are projected and transferred over to our relationships of any kind, including friendships. This can look like extracting the value from others the same way value, talent, time, and energy are extracted from a person, and we call it “labor” or “workforce.” The same way value and offerings are extracted from the planet and its biodiverse resources, and we call it “innovation” and “progress.” We are taking and sometimes even stealing the unique offerings of another person and either reciprocating at a calculated rate (i.e., what we know they will tolerate so we can keep extracting what we want unchecked) or not reciprocating at all. In order to be in true community with others, we must pursue the journey of divesting from capitalism, colonialism, and individualism, with specific regard to how we view, treat, and interact with our friends. This is why some friendships fade over time, despite their depth and the significant role they play in one person's life. If we still view our friendships as transactional, then when someone moves away or when we see them less, we feel their value to our lives has lessened or expired. So, we search the shelf for new merchandise. This approach to friendships fails to place value on the individual as not only a part of but also as an expression of the collective. When we view our relationships as expressions of the collective, we view them as an extension of ourselves.
When friendships are transactional and valued through the lens of individualism (what is this person's value to me, not what is this person's value), then we can face resentment, burnout, and deep disconnection. I’m a supporter of people creating boundaries and divesting from transactional relationships. But, how can we honor our personal needs in the ways we prioritize connections to others in our life, without also perpetuating the capitalist, colonial norms embedded in our relationships? How do we move away from discarding relationships, just like all the stuff we buy but don’t need, piling up and polluting our lands and waters? How do we move away from a transactional and consumerist model of friendship and community, toward one rooted in mutual aid and collective reciprocal care?
Embracing Friendships as Community
To appropriately decolonize our relationships with each other, we must first identify and seek to dismantle the underlying power structures therein. Just saying you are “in community” with your friends, does not make it so. If you aren’t actively creating deeper and more meaningful connection and support, then you aren’t in community after all. Moreover, how are you addressing and correcting the power dynamics in your friendships? How are you divesting from engrained capitalism and rejecting transactional friendships? How are you recognizing, affirming, and lifting up the unique value of your friends, because the value itself is integral to the community and not because doing so does something for you in return?
There is more widespread awareness surrounding divesting from individualistic norms within the context of romantic relationships, and most of us agree we should not expect to depend on our partner(s) to meet all our needs or to be our only source of support. But what happens when the constellation of extra-romantic relationships we count on are rooted in individualist, capitalist, Western colonial norms? We can be left feeling like our needs remain unmet, and we can project our feelings inward and blame ourselves for needing or expecting too much. Friendships are such an integral role into the lives of individuals but when we think of them only as so deeply personal and intimate (which they can be beautifully), we are missing the integral role they actually play in the community landscape of support, resource, opportunity, giving, and receiving that is crucial to building true community with each other. There is joy in giving itself when you view all relationships as an extension of community and therefore an extension of yourself.
If you aren’t actively creating deeper and more meaningful connection and support with those you are in community with, then you aren’t in community after all. If you aren’t actively trying to expand the circle of community and care, you are only perpetuating individualistic notions of relationships, valuing and boosting others only in relation to self-service, only when you feel you have something to gain. Being in community means reciprocity without keeping score. How and what we give to others can and should be based on our unique abilities and giftings. This means that what we receive from our friends may not mirror what they receive from us, and that is not only okay, but it is a hallmark of a true collective. And when things are challenging, bids for connection and support can be met, because we know there is inherent value in offering a friend support, that there is a ripple effect throughout the community every time a person we are connected to feels supported and valued. This ripple effect journeys its way back to us in time too, and being in true community means we will never go without, as long as we have each other.
